Meet the Author

Gail Sakurai

As a child, Gail Sakurai was an enthusiastic reader. The more she read, the more she thought she'd like to become an author herself. She began writing stories when she was about eight years old.

But as she grew older, Sakurai moved away from writing. In college she studied foreign languages, and after graduation, she and her husband started a family. Sakurai read book after book to her two children when they were young. This revived her own dream of writing books, especially children's books. When her youngest child started going to school, Sakurai started making that dream come true. In addition to retelling folktales, she has written books about the United States in the colonial and revolutionary periods, the Library of Congress, and Asian Americans in the Old West.

For a long time Gail Sakurai was a fan of the TV series Star Trek and movies based on the show. This interest served her well as she began writing. At first she helped write a newsletter for Star Trek fans. Later, this same interest led her to write her biography of space scientist Mae Jemison, as well as a biography of Stephen Hawking, a scientist who studies the universe.